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‘If you have ever wondered how the biotechnology industry has been able to develop the cozy and unquestioning relationship with the federal government that it has today, you need not look much further than Big Biotech’s lobbying expenditures. According to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek report, biotech giant Monsanto spent a whopping $2 million just in the third quarter of 2011 lobbying the federal government to support its agenda.

One of its loftiest lobbying seasons on record, Monsanto’s Q3 payoffs to our so-called public servants in Washington has kept the wheels greased, so to speak, for expanding its monopoly on patented agriculture. This multi-million dollar bribe from the world’s most evil company will help ensure that genetically-modified (GM) alfalfa, for instance, avoids running into any more regulatory roadblocks, even though the crop is useless, and will only serve to contaminate the entire food supply.’

‘Things are suddenly heating up again with Fukushima. As we reported yesterday, the southern wall of Fukushima reactor #4 apparently collapsed over the past few days, calling into question the structural integrity of the remainder of the containment building.

The mainstream media has said absolutely nothing about this development, continuing its pattern of downplaying news involving Fukushima, radiation or the flawed structure of nuclear power plants. This is hardly surprising, given that many of the largest media outlets (such as NBC and MSNBC) are owned by corporations such as General Electric, the designer of many of the world’s nuclear power plants.’

‘Representing one of the most agriculturally bio-diverse nations in the world, India has become a primary target for biotechnology companies like Monsanto and Cargill to spread their genetically-modified (GM) crops into new markets. However, a recent France 24 report explains that the Indian government has decided to take an offensive approach against this attempted agricultural takeover by suing Monsanto for “biopiracy,” accusing the company of stealing India’s indigenous plants in order to re-engineer them into patented varieties.

Brinjal, also known in Western nations as eggplant, is a native Indian crop for which there are roughly 2,500 different unique varieties. Millions of Indian farmers grow brinjal, which is used in a variety of Indian food dishes, and the country grows more than a quarter of the world’s overall supply of the vegetable.’

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists – because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

The result – which threatens to upend a century of physics – will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.

In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.

“We tried to find all possible explanations for this,” said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.

“We wanted to find a mistake – trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects – and we didn’t,” he told BBC News.

“When you don’t find anything, then you say ‘Well, now I’m forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'”

Caught speeding?

The speed of light is the Universe’s ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics – as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity – depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.

Much of modern physics depends on the idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light

Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.

But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.

Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.

The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.

In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance.

The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.

But the group understands that what are known as “systematic errors” could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit, and that has motivated them to publish their measurements.

“My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing – then I would be relieved,” Dr Ereditato said.

But for now, he explained, “we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result – because it is crazy”.

‘In recent tests, water samples from US water treatment plants discovered that the artificial sweetener sucralose (Splenda) is a widespread contaminant in both source water and treated water. Sucralose is a persistent contaminant as it is not broken down by the chemical water treatment process.

Previous research has shown that sucralose can destroy up to 50 percent of beneficial intestinal bacteria (probiotics), which are essential for general health and a strong immune system. Sucralose is chemically closer to DDT and Agent Orange than it is to sugar.’